Secret Legacy (29 page)

Richard faced the armed lieutenant and their elder, his hand remaining wrapped around Sarah’s, his mind still searching for hers. A four-man security team backed Donovan up, weapons drawn, all of them Watchers Richard and Jeff had busted their asses to train. Richard couldn’t detect any of their thoughts. Which meant their psychic shields were being augmented. He shifted his focus to Jacob.

“I’m not a threat to the Brotherhood,” Richard said. “Neither is Sarah, nor her sister.”

“All evidence is to the contrary,” Jacob said.

“You can’t attack the center complex without the Temples’ support. The center’s waiting for us to make the first move, just as I sensed at the surveillance site.”

“I suspect they won’t know how we’re coming,” Jacob said, “if your participation is removed from the planning. Taking you and the Temples out of the equation gives us the tactical advantage.”

“You’re being manipulated, sir.”

“We’re very aware, Colonel, of our egregious errors in judgment where you and the Temple Legacy are concerned. One of our top lieutenants is dead. Two other Watchers are in critical condition. Legacies have been exposed. Principals most likely taken by the center. How much more damage would you have us absorb before we decree this legacy too out of control and dangerous to be allowed to continue?”

“You’ll have to come with us.” Donovan stepped closer.

“Not until I recover Sarah’s mind from the nightmare’s matrix.”

“That’s no longer your concern,” Jacob said.

“It’s my only concern at the moment.” Richard looked
around the lab at the dazed Watchers beginning to stir from the mission. At Madeline, whose condition seemed to have stabilized thanks to Jarred Keith’s efforts. But she wasn’t yet fully back. None of the mission team were conscious enough to help him explain what had happened. He had to buy them more time.

“The matrix shouldn’t have been capable of physically harming any of these people,” he reasoned to Jacob. “Trinity Temple’s powers are beyond anything we’ve dealt with before. We have to understand—”

“And we will,” Jacob said. “Once we debrief the team we sanctioned to guide the dream—at the same time we ordered you not to interfere. Then we’ll take care of the center and Trinity before any more damage can be done to our order or the other legacies we protect.”

Movement to Richard’s right caught his attention a second before a sharp sting pierced his arm. He looked down to see the needle being removed. His brain registered a moment’s shock at being caught off guard. Then his psychic barriers were dropping, leaving his mind defenseless, powerless. The security team rushed forward.

Donovan and another lieutenant grabbed Richard’s arms. His knees buckled.

“My suppression protocol,” he mumbled.

“Yes, sir.” Donovan was apologetic, but resigned to his duty.

Richard’s hand was dragged away from Sarah’s. A scream of denial sliced through her mind, then through him to the security team that he could no longer shield from her thoughts.

“Wait,” he begged as they dragged him away. “Did you feel that? She’s waking up.”

“No,” Jacob said, “she’s not.”

Richard looked back to see the man’s hologram directing a lab tech to inject Sarah, then Madeline, with the suppression meds that would trap their realities wherever they were currently anchored—leaving their minds in limbo.

The door to his dream lab whooshed shut, and he was dragged away.

There was no color in the darkness. No gentle warmth or enticing currents. No healing touch calling Sarah to the surface. Everything had been stripped away by the sound of a gunshot she couldn’t quite remember. A child’s scream, which had become her scream, then had become a truth that she’d never wanted to know.

It was familiar, the emptiness floating around her.

It was home.

It was beyond the madness she’d run from.

Except . . .

She didn’t belong in this lost place. She’d sworn never to come back. She wasn’t crazy. She never had been. Forgetting and hiding wasn’t who she was anymore. It wasn’t who she’d been born to be. It had destroyed too much. There was a future waiting. A truth she’d run from. A duty she could no longer deny.

Specto. Tego. Asservo.
The Watcher’s Creed. Sarah’s creed now. She’d been dreaming of this moment her whole life—the moment when she’d be called to protect her legacy. There were people needing her to wake up. People
she
needed. Maddie, bleeding in Richard’s arms. Richard, staring down at his dead friend. Trinity—her
daughter—knowing only hate and revenge and destruction, never love. Her little girl’s faith dying while she cried into Sarah’s dreams for help.

Her daughter . . .

Sarah’s memories surged back, conquering the vagueness that had filled the chasm between where her body was being held in a bunker detention cell and where her mind had been stranded when her nightmare’s connection with Trinity dissolved. It was excruciating, drowning all over again in her dream’s destruction. But Sarah had to feel it. She had to see it. She had to escape the safe nothingness her mind had been banished to. She had to face the reality that was far worse than her dreams had ever been.

She needed her team. She needed to make this right, somehow, before it was too late.

She could sense frantic activity as her consciousness returned to her body. She couldn’t move, but she could feel powerful minds nearby prepping for battle. The minds of Watchers.

Debriefing.

Reviewing.

Securing.

Planning to . . . silence a deadly psychic power. A legacy that couldn’t be controlled. Sarah’s daughter had become the center’s ultimate psychic weapon, and the Brotherhood was going to stop her.

Sarah’s memory replayed the innocence lurking in Trinity’s angry eyes. The pain and the betrayal. The light that Sarah had glimpsed shining behind Trinity’s scarred, impenetrable door. Bright white light. The purest of colors, glowing with her daughter’s potential for
redemption. Light that was trapped within darkness, like the dimness of the bedroom where Trinity had met Sarah.

Trinity had said then that she wasn’t supposed to be there, that
they’d
find out. Sarah had assumed she was talking about the Watchers, then the center team who’d attacked them. But now that she’d met her child, or at least the little girl Ruebens had brainwashed Trinity into becoming, she knew better. She’d heard the desolation in her daughter’s voice when their nightmare finally ended.

Trinity had felt trapped. She’d become trapped as much as Sarah was, in the deadly evolution of their legacy. And at the Lenox house, Trinity had been afraid that someone at the center would discover her mind reaching beyond them. She’d been afraid that Sarah would never come. That she’d always be alone.

Trinity’s whole life had been Ruebens’s programming, believing that his evil was all she had. That Ruebens was the only one who loved her. That except for the death he’d raised her to cause, she was nothing. Exactly the way a part of Sarah had once felt, exactly the way she’d been vulnerable to Ruebens’s tactics before Richard had shown her a new dream to believe in.

Her daughter had been taught to hate Watchers and to hate her family and to hate all but the darkest parts of her legacy. She’d never learned to balance the explosive dichotomy at the heart of their family’s strength, any more than Sarah had before Richard taught her, protected her, and loved her.

But a part of Trinity wanted to be different, Sarah was certain of it. A part of Trinity was still searching,
needing to believe Ruebens was wrong. The part that was dying, because no one else had come for her. The part that had haunted a house for five years, running everyone else away while she waited for her mother to come home.

Sarah still didn’t trust the Brotherhood she’d been absorbed into. A part of her would always blame the council for what their blindness had allowed Jeff Coleridge to do while they focused their distrust and contempt on Sarah’s weakness. But Trinity deserved the same chance she’d been given. She deserved a life beyond the prison of the center’s experiments and training where she’d been trapped since birth. A future Sarah alone couldn’t give her child.

“Richard?”

Sarah’s call fluttered through the silence of their minds, across the distance separating their individual locations at the bunker. Their psychic senses fired to life along with their link. The medication dampening Sarah’s ability to project relinquished its hold, the way she’d been able to defeat the potency of Richard’s other chemical safeguards. Only now, his strength was augmenting her growing powers, helping her recover even faster.

“I’m here.” Richard’s thoughts caressed hers, filling her mind with magical sounds: wind, night creatures, a canopy of tree limbs rustling overhead, filtering the moon’s silvery glow.

“My sister?” Sarah asked. “Is she—”

“Madeline’s stabilized, but her consciousness was sedated like ours.”

“Your mind
. . .
” Sarah pushed deeper. “I can barely feel you.”

“Suppression drugs. I couldn’t project through them without your help. Now that you’re here, I can
. . .
For now, I’m managing to block the bunker’s sensors from picking up our psychic energy.”

Energy that flowed from him to Sarah, then back to him,
the circuit never ending. Through their link came the sensation of Richard’s lips caressing her cheek, her temple, her mouth. Sarah kissed him back, absorbing his grief and anger over Jeff. His concern for the council’s hasty plans to attack the center complex.

“You came back to me.” His mind stroked hers. “When I couldn’t feel you after the dream matrix dissolved, I thought I’d lost you.”

“For a while.” The tears Sarah had been holding back flooded their link. “A part of me wanted to stay lost between the dream and here. To hide again.”

“I know, love,” he said. His understanding and hearing him say “love” healed her as nothing else could. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect you from—”

“The truth?”

She needed him to tell her it had all been just a horrible nightmare. But she knew he couldn’t. And she couldn’t let him.

“My child’s been taught to kill, just like I was.” Sarah’s mind sank deeper into the fantasy of her head nestled in the crook of Richard’s shoulder.

“But you’re not a killer, Sarah.” The warmth of his voice, his breath on her cheek, made her long to be lying naked in his arms beneath forest moonlight.

“I was going to kill Jeff,” she said, “once he’d made the decision to shoot Trinity.”

“He put us all at risk. He lost his perspective on what our order was created to do. He—”

“He was your second-in-command. Your best friend is dead because of me. You killed him to save my daughter.”

“Stopping him and the threat he’d become to the psychic realm was my job.” Richard’s conviction that he’d done the right thing was as real and as heartbreaking as his acceptance of
his parents’ deaths. “Your family is the Brotherhood’s future, you and other powerful legacies we need to join us. The council may not be able to control you, but they can’t stop the center without you. They’ll grow to trust you once they know the whole story.”

“They’ve neutralized my mind. At least they tried to. They don’t want my help.”

“They don’t have a choice. Give them time to realize that. Because of you, they know who Trinity is and how she’s being used against us.”

“Because I failed to control the dream while she attacked our team.”

“Watchers aren’t perfect. Missions fail. But you’re still fighting. You found me. You’re unpredictable and flawed and dangerously powerful, just like your daughter. But you’ve become everything a Watcher should be, Sarah. You’re everything I’ve dreamed of.”

His kiss and his confidence feathered through their connection. Desire burst to life. It felt as if the sun had risen just beyond their closed eyes, the light growing brighter by the second, banishing the last remnants of a winter’s nightmare. Sarah clung to their link. He was Rick again in their stolen moment, and he would never abandon her.

She was still terrified of losing the amazing feeling of him in her mind. She was still afraid to believe in this kind of perfection when the Brotherhood and the center and even Trinity were doing everything they could to destroy the world Sarah finally wanted to live in. But she’d been right to seek him out, to trust him when she still wasn’t sure she could trust anything the council said or what they’d do next. There was nowhere else she wanted to be, she realized, except fighting by Richard’s side.

Within their shared consciousness, she inched away, breathing deeply.

“What do we do now?” She sent her awareness deeper, joining his mind and hers with the Brotherhood. “I can feel the council preparing for battle. Do they know what happened in the dream? An attack on the center complex may be exactly what Trinity’s handlers want. Do they know what she’s capable of if I can’t reach her again and get her to stop?”